Pi-hole

[orbitup]

I stumbled upon this today and it looks promising. Of course I know how to work WITH a computer but not ON a computer so I'm looking for a little validation here. Anyone use it? Pros/cons?

For the uninitiated, https://pi-hole.net/

 

[sucker76]

This is for Linux based OS's. It looks to be geared towards Raspberry Pi

Supported Operating Systems¶
The following operating systems are officially supported:

• Raspbian: Jessie / Stretch
• Ubuntu: 16.04 / 16.10
• Fedora: 27 / 28
• Debian: 8 / 9
• CentOS: 7 (not ARM)

 

[sucker76]

I have a Raspberry Pi model 2B. Even with the "lite browser" it is painfully slow at web browsing. I don't have the patience to wait on it let alone use an ad blocker. The Pi is more useful for other projects.

 

[Brains]

A Pi hole is basically a DNS blacklist. You can do very similar and even the same thing in many other ways, it's just a nice community supported project that's cheap and easy to implement. The Pi isn't doing any heavy lifting at all, it's just serving/filtering your DNS queries.

 

[sucker76]

OK so this used the Pi as a go-between (with the Pi-hole software) to protect my privacy? So mine only has a 100mbps Ethernet port. Will this inherently bottleneck everything to that speed?

 

[Brains]

Not all traffic goes through it. Thus, it could run at 10Mbit/sec. and still not bottleneck a gigabit network since it's only there to process DNS lookups (e.g. www.texasguntalk.com ==> 64.140.160.214). You can google how DNS works, but the cliffnotes version is every site you visit has a numeric address behind it. So when you go to TGT, you type the address in your browser, and behind the scenes the computer has to look up what the numeric address for it is. This process is the Domain Name Service. The amount of data sent and received is very small, and it happens very quickly. What a Pi-Hole does is answer those queries for all of the computers you point to it, and it will only send addresses for "good" sites. For undesirable stuff, the "Pi" tells your computer to instead load data from a "hole" - so it loads nothing and moves on.. Quickly.. It generally makes browsing faster, because you're not wasting computing power and network bandwidth loading garbage.

 

[orbitup]

Not all traffic goes through it. Thus, it could run at 10Mbit/sec. and still not bottleneck a gigabit network since it's only there to process DNS lookups (e.g. www.texasguntalk.com ==> 64.140.160.214). You can google how DNS works, but the cliffnotes version is every site you visit has a numeric address behind it. So when you go to TGT, you type the address in your browser, and behind the scenes the computer has to look up what the numeric address for it is. This process is the Domain Name Service. The amount of data sent and received is very small, and it happens very quickly. What a Pi-Hole does is answer those queries for all of the computers you point to it, and it will only send addresses for "good" sites. For undesirable stuff, the "Pi" tells your computer to instead load data from a "hole" - so it loads nothing and moves on.. Quickly.. It generally makes browsing faster, because you're not wasting computing power and network bandwidth loading garbage.

Thanks for the explanation. Is this something a beginner can do or is there an easier way to do it? I like the idea of blocking ads on my phone and tablet too. Not that I would block ads on TGT of course.

 

[Brains]

If you're willing to spend the time to read and learn, a Pi-Hole can be built by anyone. The online guides are quite good and detailed, but some concepts may be foreign to non-techies. Even then, you can definitely get it done by asking questions when you get stuck.

 

[m5215]

A Pi hole is basically a DNS blacklist. You can do very similar and even the same thing in many other ways, it's just a nice community supported project that's cheap and easy to implement. The Pi isn't doing any heavy lifting at all, it's just serving/filtering your DNS queries.

While working in IT at my last job the network administrator set this up to be used and it worked well from what I overheard about it.